Service providers are continually challenged to develop new and innovative services to remain competitive. Consumer adoption of mobile devices, such as cellular telephones, laptop computers, pagers, personal digital assistants, and the like, is increasing. These devices can be used for a diversity of purposes ranging from basic communications, to conducting business transactions, to managing entertainment media, as well as a host of other tasks. Additional enhancements, such as location-awareness features, e.g., global positioning system (GPS) tracking, also enable mobile device users to monitor their position and present their location via a local display. Such mobile technology have enabled users to access rich media services over a data communications infrastructure, such as the Internet. However, little effort has been expended to integrate mobile technology with mature services such as broadcast radio. There are numerous broadcast radio stations available to users—e.g., news, weather, talk radio, sports, music, other forms of entertainment, etc.; all of which have limited geographical constraints for their radio broadcasts. Furthermore, users often may not know what broadcast stations are available, especially while traveling to unfamiliar areas. This is particularly challenging with the variety and routing changes in broadcast radio programming. Unfortunately, users in such a situation must resort to utilizing the radio tuner to scan for local radio stations that suits their listening preferences. This random tuning for radio stations can be time consuming, and serve as a deterrent to listening to the radio all together.
Therefore, there is a need for an approach that can efficiently and effectively locate broadcast stations.